you cannot have what i offered you before the election. what election? that's how the republican house speaker is playing the game this week. maybe in the world of the beltway and the sunday morning talk shows, maybe that makes sense. in the real world, here's what happened. here's the bigger picture. our economy broke very, very badly. not long ago on a historic scale. now in the real world, we are having these tiny little glimmers of recovery of economic growth. the first blue bar, that's when the stimulus bill went into effect. the stimulus kicks in and the economy starts to grow after having fallen off a cliff. that's the real cliff. just the other day, we learned our latest glimmer of growth was bigger than we had thought it was, which was awesome. the bad news, though, is that we are in danger of falling back. we are in real danger. the deficit is not the biggest problem in the country. the deficit is shrinking by hundreds of millions of dollars every year the president has been in office. to the extent we need to use debt to accomplish other goals